The Gift

Hola Everybody,
I wrote this a few years ago and I’m revisiting it today because it’s time for me to the exercise again. The post is based on a conversation I had with a good friend over Sunday brunch. She, in turn, first came across the story in a book.

The Five Wishes

The following is neither new nor earth shattering. It’s quite simple, actually. However, this post can change your life... 

 

A good friend called me all excited this past Sunday, and as we walked together to have a late brunch, she related the following to me:

Imagine you’re on your deathbed, this very moment, tonight or fifty years from now. Try to make a mental picture. Got it?

I stand by your deathbed, look you in the eyes, and ask, “Was your life a complete success?” 

You might say, “Yes, my life has been a complete success,” or you might say, “No, my life has not been a complete success.”

If you answered, “No, my life has not been a complete success,” you would have a reason why. For example, J. Paul Getty, who was once the wealthiest man in the world, is reputed to have said on his deathbed, “I’d gladly give up all my millions for one experience of marital happiness.” If he could have had one wish granted, that would’ve been his wish.

Still with me? Wondering what this has to do with you?

Well, here it is then, if you had told me on your deathbed that your life had not been a success, what would be the things you’d wished happened that would have made it a success?

The question cuts to the core: what are you really doing on this planet? What is your life purpose? Do you have a mission? As my friend asked me these questions, I felt more than a little anxiety, but on another level, there was a sense of relief -- a sense of being able to go inside and reach into myself in an empowering way.

Back to you: you have to answer the question. You can't get back to me while you mull your responses. You’re on your deathbed; you can’t afford to continue to live as if you’re never going to die. This moment is all you have anyway. There’s no right or wrong answer, or perhaps you’re one of those rare individuals who feels his or her life has been a total success (I have yet to meet one). Dig deep, give yourself permission and the answers will come.

Whatever your answer, look at it from the perspective of your deathbed. Put in the past tense, and do it from the point of view that your life was not a success. Here’s one of my own:

My life was not a complete success because I never really got around to expressing to my loved ones how much I loved and appreciated them. I wish I had told my son how sad I felt at how we had grown apart.

In other words, I wished I had paid more attention to the relationships with the people most important to me and that I had communicated my feelings more often to the people I loved and cared about.

My friend then asked me, “Now turn that into a goal. Put it in the present tense.”

My life is a complete success because I express my deepest feelings with all my friends and family. I say the important things I need to say and do all the important things I need to do. There is nothing significant that I leave unsaid or undone.

My friend went on to ask me to list four more deathbed wishes and then she asked me, “Where are you with achieving each of those goals?” Realistically, I had to admit that most of my deathbed wishes were mostly a lot of good ideas rather than actual realities.

I was reminded of my experiences when I worked in a hospital ward for terminally ill patients. These were people who knew they were going to die -- soon. And whenever I asked them if they had one more illness-free year, what they would do with that one year, there answers were never was anything like, “Make more money,” or, “Invent some wonderful gadget,” or “Spend more time at the office,” or “Worry more about money.”

Their responses were mostly very simple: spend more time with their loved ones; to take the time to enjoy life more often; to say I’m sorry instead of holding a grudge; or to spend more time with family and loved ones.

My friend then took me a bookstore and showed me the book she had been reading. It’s called “The Five Wishes,” by Gay Hendricks. In it, he shares his five deathbed wishes and how he went about realizing them. It’s a small little book, and there’s a website where you can download a worksheet to help you recognize and realize your own five wishes. For me, they are more like personal promises and it’s a gentle way to make manifest a rewarding and fulfilling life.

So many of my friends online and off are struggling these days. It seems that too many of us are counting pennies and it seems like each day brings another struggle, another challenge or setback Whatever the case, I truly wish all of you genuine happiness. If I prayed, my prayer for you would be that you’d be given the opportunity to do what you most love to do and to do it joyously and passionately. I strongly recommend you visit the website and check out the free video based on the book (click here).

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization…

U-Turn

Hola mi Gente,

This is the longest I have been without regular work in 20 years. Sometimes it’s hard to keep sight of the light of the end of this dark tunnel. Still, every day I wake up, I wake up a winner. I already won today. Besides, regardless of my employment status, there’s this beautiful thing called life happening all around me. Gotta grab it by the throat while I still can. LOL

On another note, I am hoping to attend the Sanders rally in the South Bronx later today at the South Bronx’s St. Mary’s Park. More info here. I am not a Sanders’ supporter, but there is no question in my mind that he offers a viable and pragmatic alternative to the corporate democrat, Hillary Clinton. Some have even accused me of exercising my “privilege” clearly ignorant of my Puerto Rican heritage. My response is, you need to recognize your privilege if you think can afford a possible eight years of Hillary Clinton and the status quo. Because I don’t know about you, but I clearly understand that eight years of more fracking, more mass incarceration and the private prison industry, eternal war, and the military takeover of democratically elected foreign governments, is untenable.

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The Life You Were Meant to Live

Life is change, growth is optional, choose wisely.

 -- Karen Kaiser Clark

I once read a book that asked the question, “What if you woke up one morning and realized you were living the wrong life?” LOL! I love it!

While people won't say it explicitly, in my work I get the sense that most people feel as if they're playing a starring role in a drama they never intended to play. I get this sense from so many people that they are somehow living the wrong life.

The thing is I see people do complete about faces all the time. In fact, I'm one of those people. About 26 years ago, I was a hopelessly addicted addict in solitary confinement -- sick, suffering from years of malnutrition, totally defeated -- it doesn't get any more hopeless than that. But something clicked right before then and many times after. My turn-around -- my about face -- happened in small increments until I evolved into the life I feel I was meant to live.

Others change in a flash. Gandhi and the French painter, Gauguin, changed overnight and undertook causes at a great price. Gauguin was a stockbroker leading the perfectly normal middle-class life and he just left one day. Left his wife and children and decided to become a painter. What's more, he painted in a style that was totally misunderstood by the public at the time. He lived most of the rest of his life in abject poverty and in the process condemned his wife and children to a life of destitution. Gauguin is today considered one of the greatest of the post-impressionists. I doubt that in his lifetime, Gauguin ever sold a painting for a significant sum of money. Eventually he died of syphilis and penniless. But he painted until the end of his life.

That was his passion. What's yours?

Gandhi, a chameleon if ever there was one, coined the term, “Be the change you want in the world.” He too was living a comfortable life until one day he was confronted with racism and it changed him forever. Whatever you might say about his inconsistencies, he was probably the single most influential pacifist in the 20^th century. His work influenced such people as Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh and countless others.

People do about faces all the time. People change political parties and careers, people give up their jobs as doctors and become poets, mothers quit their families to pursue careers and athletes quit their careers to spend more time with their families. There are passive people who become revolutionaries for a cause they didn't care about the day before.

I guess the message is that you can change at any time, no matter what your external circumstances. The people mentioned above are no different than you in many cases. We like to say, Those people were different, they were special. We're just plain folk. Well, if you look at the history of these change agents, you notice that they were just plain folk too. In fact, some had tasted failure numerous times before they found their calling.

What will you do when you get your wake-up call? Will you just turn over and fall asleep? Or will you heed the call? Because I can assure of this: you will be called. Perhaps you have been called already. 

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization... 

Sunday Sermon [Woundology]

Hola Everybody...

I hope you have had the opportunity to spend time with family – both the biological and chosen types…

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Transcending Wounds

We all wear masks, and the time comes when we cannot remove them without removing some of our own skin. 
 -- André Berthiaume

I am firmly convinced there is a conspiracy out to get me. This is true, don’t look at me that way, I ain’t crazy! I know, for example, that there is a covert association of elderly women out there somewhere whose solitary mission is to send its members to block my way on the streets and on subway platforms. And don’t get me started on that group of train conductors whose mission statement is to get me stuck in between subway stations and close subway doors right in my face.

Then there’s that damned OAA (Overly-Analytical Association) women’s group, hell-bent on sending me women who “think” through even mundane stuff (like sex, for example) to the point where it is isn’t even fun anymore! And don’t get me started on the “Evil Parents” consortium that determined to have me born into a poor household headed by traumatized parents themselves barely out of their teens.

It’s a conspiracy! It’s true, I tell ya!

I’m exaggerating, of course, but for a long time I took things very personal, as if life had somehow conspired to fuck me without the dignity of a kiss. While I knew that old ladies weren’t organizing against me (as if I were that important), my reactions were just the same -- flagrant anger and bitterness that I dressed up in a cynically chic “that’s my life” outerwear. It’s considered chic and cool to wear our wounds nonchalantly -- you hear people constantly say stupid shit like, “Life sucks… ” as if it were all predetermined.

There’s a fairly erotic scene in one of the Lethal Weapon films in which Mel Gibson’s and Rene Russo’s characters compare scars as a prelude to sex. “I have this scar,” says Mel, and Rene counters with, “Ha! That’s nothing, look at this one!” They go on like this until both have managed to take off all their clothes in their mad dash to outdo one another.

It’s funny a funny scene, but like with a lot of fiction there’s a fair amount of truth to it. As a society, we have developed what the medical intuitive, Carolyn Myss, calls a dysfunctional “language of intimacy.” An intimacy that is based, she goes on to say, on “Woundology.” Briefly, woundology is recognizing that we have come to an important insight, namely that we need to bring out into the open our secrets – wounds -- discussing them in a healthy manner. This is a very powerful and fairly recent development. What has happened, however, is that we have gotten stuck on our wounds -- a “woundology.” We have become addicted to our wounds. We have come to be defined by our wounds.

You see it all the time. You meet someone, and before you even get to know them, you’re privy to some pretty much intimate details of that person. This is what happens when we merely admit or acknowledge our shortcomings, or wounds. Everything becomes filtered through the perspective of an incest survivor, or a widow, or an addict, an abused child, etc. Please, don’t get me wrong here: it’s extremely important that we bring into the light that which resides in the shadows. And many, many people keep all this shit stuffed inside, in the process causing both physical and psychological dis-ease, but that is only part of the issue. There are other steps we have to take.

If only I had a better childhood… If only I didn't have my hardships… 

This over identification and obsession with our wounds is so powerful that we actually become attached to them. In fact, many people don’t really want to heal or change, they’re too enamored of their wounds to do that. I have a relative who’s always harping on her parents and how her parents are the cause for her inability to relate, to be a good parent herself, the rain, and the car that just cut her off… well you get the idea. When I challenge this belief system, she freaks, or she just stops listening. The end result is that she’s an essentially unhappy person who is infecting her own children with the same behavior pattern of learned unhappiness.

Take away the wound, we seem to be saying, and what do we become? I’m no longer just a recovering addict? I’m not just an incest survivor? OMG!!! 

Acceptance is the gateway toward forgiveness. I am not speaking here of passive acceptance to how things were or are. I am also not speaking here of forgiveness in the way we normally see it. Acceptance in this context is coming to the realization of things how they are (as opposed to how we want them to be). Forgiveness in this context is not forgiving others, but forgiving ourselves. When we cling to our wounds, we are actually punishing ourselves because we do not see ourselves as worthy or whole. When we accept the facts of our lives, we can then move towards maturity and the development of true happiness. We all deal with hardships; you are not that unique, really. And life sometimes isn’t fair. As my mother used to say, “You want fairness, go to kindergarten.” She’s right, life isn’t about fairness, it’s about reality.

So, in a sense, it would be correct to say that we need to love those aspects of ourselves we like least in order to move beyond our wounds to the space where healing begins. Acceptance opens the door to forgiveness which opens the door to Love, which in turn leads toward integration, healing, and wholeness.

Many of us like to say we’ve moved past all this, but I still see the bitterness, unhappiness, and tendency toward blame. Can you raise your hand? I mean, I see that tendency within myself. I especially see it in the people who often say something like, “Yeah, people need to get over it... ” or some bullshit like that. It’s not about getting over it, it’s about integration, not negation.

Then again, maybe there is something to this conspiracy theory thingee... naw! LOL

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization…